Rock Songs and Razorblades
by Storm Seller
Summary: In which a trip is taken, stationery is stolen, House has a hunch and Wilson learns never to lie to a fellow addict. Slash.
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: I know, __I know - it's not **Amends** or **SA**_**, **_which has a lot to do with the fact that I shouldn't even be writing fic at the moment. However, ages ago I was sent a prompt that I never fulfilled and now the muse won't shut up. So here's an entirely random piece of old school House/Wilson to tide everyone over until I can go back to the epics._

_P.S: This one is in six parts, already written up and finished, so no messing around waiting for updates! ;)  
><em>

**_PLEASE READ THE WARNINGS!_**

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><p><strong>Rock Songs and Razorblades<br>**

Author: Storm

Rating/Warnings: Hard R; **Possible self-harm trigger.**

Summary: In which a trip is taken, stationery is stolen, House has a hunch and Wilson learns not to lie to a fellow addict.

Disclaimer: Everything belongs to Greg House. Including his creators. And theirs.

_The views expressed by the characters do not necessarily reflect the view of the author._

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><p><strong>Part One:<strong>

"That was three thousand dollars and three days of my life that I'll never get back."

House reclaimed his cane from the stewardess and heaved himself out of the rickety wheelchair that had transported him from the first class aeroplane cabin to the cattle-pen enclosure of the air-conditioned terminal. Wilson followed him out of the tunnel, rubbing the cricks from the back of his neck.

"Not to mention thirty-six Vicodin that should have lasted a full week," he pointed out reproachfully.

House snorted, his cane clumping vigorously on the streaked, well-worn linoleum as they plodded through the immigration queues. Separated by stony-faced attendants at passport control, he continued at baggage collection:

"In the universal hierarchy of pain and suffering, that conference ranked so high that thirty-six _bottles_ wouldn't have been enough to make it bearable – hey, watch it! Cripple here. If you take my cane out with the baggage trolley, I get to ride in it."

"Sorry." Wilson dragged it back on course, peering awkwardly over the erratically heaped suitcases House had tossed onto it from the grey conveyor belt chuntering endlessly around behind them. "I think the front wheel started its life as a kid's bicycle stabiliser."

"If you didn't pack as though you were _moving_ to L.A.—"

Wilson hauled the trolley to one side of the walkway and braked. He walked around to the side of it and began to reload the bags so that the strap from his carry-on wasn't dragging under the wheels.

"One of these is the one I put together for you, because spending seventy-two hours without a change of clothes or a toothbrush is a cheap way to get out of going to panels."

House shrugged, glancing down at the wrinkled t-shirt he'd slept in on the last night; revenge for Wilson having housekeeping iron all three of his shirts and press both pairs of jeans every morning of the conference.

"Gets me out of spending all night with you too."

"This again?" Wilson kicked the brake off and trudged on towards the exit doors. "You want a double room showing up on our expenses claims? Planning to write the next Noel Coward play out of Cuddy's reaction? Because you'll need someone else to play your co-star."

"Here we go again."

"House." Wilson shunted the cart over into the trolley collection point. He leaned heavily on the handles and scrubbed a hand over his face, holding up the queues of departing travellers. "That wasn't—I didn't mean—There's no one else—"

House scoffed, darkly. "This time."

"Grace is dead," Wilson said shortly. "Her file was requested in Rome two weeks ago. I got the notification yesterday."

House stopped staring aloofly into the distance and glanced down, fidgeting with his cane handle. Wilson's shoulders slumped with a sourceless ever-present sense of defeat.

"I didn't realise that you—we've never said that we were exclusive—I…" He broke off; the brittle set of House's jaw making him question whether it had ever needed to be said. Stuttering and, as always, shunted onto his back foot by House's unpredictable insecurities, he finished: "I'm not sleeping in a different room to have kinky phone sex on hotline, you know. I-I stayed up all night with you yesterday playing Scopa d'Assi when I've never been to Italy, you change the rules every time you think you're losing, and my Latin is rusty!"

House eyed him, level and appraising, then shunted the trolley back into the stack and stole the quarter out of its coin slot.

"Coming over tonight?" he said abruptly, hefting his bags.

"Any more Viagra and your skin will turn blue. Hoh!" Wilson stepped through the exit doors and sucked in a lungful of searing air. He stopped for a moment, shading his eyes from the dazzling glare and the sudden illusion that House's skin had turned not blue but yellow.

"Blue suits me better than red suits you," House countered, clomping past him toward the parking lot, its black tarmac sweating a mirage between the sprawling terminals. "All those hot stewardesses and you didn't have pre-existing membership to the mile-high club?"

Wilson swung the cases into the back of the Volvo and slammed the trunk closed. He dusted his hands off on his suit, leaving smoky prints on the thighs of his cream pants.

"My idea of good sex usually excludes the need for throat lozenges and air sickness bags afterwards."

House snickered. "You could've timed it better with the turbulence."

"If I'd timed it worse, you'd have the opening skit for your new comedy," Wilson retorted flatly. "It may be your fantasy to turn up at PPTH E.R. with your tackle on ice in a champagne cooler, but it's not mine to come in with you whilst having my dislocated jaw held in place with my tie."

House put his cane on the roof and stretched the kinks out of his long back, showing dark oval stains under the arms of his orange t-shirt.

"Wheeled in delirious with heatstroke is much classier."

Wilson wiped the sweat off his brow with his jacket sleeve and opened the passenger door. He turned the engine over and rolled all the windows down, leaving the door hanging open. Stifling air was walled in and around the vehicle. If not for the silver sunshade propped inside the windshield, it was hot enough that in place of leather seats he'd have expected warped metal and cinders.

"We should go."

"You could take _off_ your tie. There're no donors to schmooze here."

"If I can gag you with it, I will." Wilson reached for his top button, slackening the noose at his neck.

"You do that, I can't try opening your zipper at seventy miles an hour on the freeway."

He left the tie in place. "You know, the main entrance at PPTH _could_ do with redecorating, but I don't think it looks any better coming in via the morgue."

"Wuss," House yawned, opening the door and easing into his seat.

Wilson lingered, looking back toward the terminal. He was no longer sure if he were glad he was leaving behind the networking frenzy of false smiles and cheap wine in cheaper glasses or if he wished he were headed toward it, where catheters and central lines were only words and he could get drunk enough to tell House he loved him, safe to pretend he couldn't remember in the morning.

He sighed and got into the car.

Passing along the stretch from exits twelve to fourteen, House broke off from listing twenty symptoms that could have been anything from rhinovirus to Lupus in a half-hearted game of Guess the Diagnosis. He pulled a wrinkled, revolted face.

"I _smell_ with my abused nose something beginning with F."

"IV antibiotics," Wilson said distractedly. "Levophed. Dopamine."

House looked at him strangely. "I said 'F' for Foley bags, but close enough. What's got pre-mortem embalmment on your mind?"

Wilson licked suddenly dry lips and shook his head, shrugging at the weight that had settled on his shoulders as soon as he picked up the Turnpike southbound. "Smells like the oncology wards sometimes. I've got three new patients starting chemo tomorrow."

"I thought you'd maxed out your case load?"

"Not after last week." Wilson shifted his grip on the steering wheel, as the rainbow array of cars in the flanking lanes on the highway became beds and gurneys, their white curtains pulled closed. He blinked hard, passing one hand across his face. "I sent ten families home to plan flower arrangements and choose hymns. I feel like my staff should be wearing black armbands and painting red crosses on the doors."

"The heat?" House asked quietly.

"Probably not. Probably the natural progression of the disease. But it always seems that way. A heat wave this intense has the same effect as a bad winter freeze. People up and die of exhaustion."

House nodded and proved himself a liar as he said: "Three of them were children."

"Four. Andie. Two hours before we left." Wilson steeled himself with a breath of artificially cooled air and raised the façade of a smile. "She beat my prognosis by six months."

"Tough kid," House murmured, in the tone Wilson would normally have said _brave._

Long fingers wrapped around his thigh, smoothing up and down his inseam. The rest of the journey passed in silence.

"Come in tonight."

Wilson pulled over and killed the engine. In the ticking hush, he looked down at the crinkled place on his trousers where House's hand had rested and shook his head.

"Not tonight. Between the last few weeks at the hospital and then the conference, it's been so long since I saw my bed that I'm going to start carrying a picture of it in my wallet."

House's nostrils flared, a soundless scoff of resentment and resignation. "Once you've seen one hotel room, you've seen them all."

Wilson stared through the dust-streaked window at the shapes of guitars and piano visible in the twilight gathered inside 221B, the lamps waiting to be switched on and the red glimmer of the standby light on the waiting plasma screen. He closed his eyes and wrapped his left hand around his right wrist. He plucked lightly at the thin rubber bands he wore like bracelets, so tight they cut into the tender skin, and shook his head.

"I'll see you tomorrow, House."

Keeping company with a bottle of scotch and a bunch of idiots with power tools on the plasma screen, House flexed five fingers inside a single elastic band and stared at a copy of Plato's _Republic_ on the bookcase. Halfway down the second glass, the band slipped and snapped down around his wrist. A scarlet circle burned into his pale skin. He snatched it off and catapulted it angrily across the room.

TBC…


	2. Chapter 2

**Rock Songs and Razorblades**

**Part Two:**

Wilson drove back to his own place, parked and stared through the sunroof at noctilucent clouds. Fluorescent tendrils gleamed through a fractured twilight. The Volvo's engine clicked tiredly, the brief warmth of firing mechanisms and momentum draining away in the parking lot of a $200 a night Holiday Inn. He didn't want to be here.

He wanted to be back at Baker Street, lounging on the fusty old leather couch and drinking beer while House picked out symphonies on the piano, spotlit by the streetlights glowing through the bay window. He wanted to wince when House segued into his own interpretation of _I Fought the Law (And _I _Won)_, which he'd been playing since his court case with Tritter. He wanted to meander, kissing scotch from House's chapped lips, pausing to lean against cool plaster and groping warm skin under thin t-shirts, to the bedroom and to tussle over the covers in the sporadic gusts from the temperamental air conditioner. He wanted...

It didn't matter. There was no reason to suppose, even if he turned the car around, that the offer would still be open. He'd blown it off so many times. He could no more take it up now than he could any number of the times it had been made before. It was hard enough keeping anything from House, without getting sucked into sharing bedrooms and bathrooms and swiping each other's clothes. His own insistence that they were only one another's stopgap during dry spells was all that made it possible to shower and sleep in separate places, to never bother with the niceties of undressing, to pretend that quick and dirty in suits and labcoats at work was a kink. It was like keeping a urinal apart when standing in the men's room: an illusion of privacy during intimacy. Wilson let his head fall back against the seat rest and banged it there gently. He was no longer sure which of the two he wanted more.

He got out of the car reluctantly and plodded into the hotel. The spare keys to House's apartment clinked mockingly at every step. Loneliness rushed through him with the first breath of starched sheets and polish. He locked himself into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet above the sink.

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><p>In the morning, Wilson climbed stiffly into his suit and put on his sanguine personality. He took two Tylenol and headed out to work. On his way past the front desk, the clerk handed him a brown A4 envelope and a post-it note listing his phone messages, leftover from the three days he'd been away. He drove to the hospital to the tune of the Dresden Doll's "Bad Habit," playing on the radio and the crisp crinkling of papers shifting inside the unopened envelope.<p>

When he got out of the car, he left the sun visor folded up on the backseat. In the bright early sunlight pouring through the windshield, the envelope's return address label began to bleach, fading black type to grey. The glue on the post-it note grew dry. It curled up around the same number, listed five times, and the message the last clerk had scribbled down: _Call Mom._

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><p>At home, House lay naked on the perspiring couch with his head tipped back over the arm. The fridge-freezer had been wiggled out to the extent of its cable and its doors hung open, blasting cold air into the lounge. The shaggy frost melting on the shelves dripped in syncopated staccato, disharmonious with the splosh-splash of the broken air conditioner leaking down the wall. He stroked himself absently and tried to recall if his mental centrefold of Wilson had been put together from memory or imagination.<p>

* * *

><p>Wilson escorted the new residents through rounds and started two of his three new patients on chemo. At eleven-forty he excused himself, weaved his way to the bathroom and threw up. Shivering, his lab coat wrapped tightly around him, he rested his forehead on his knees and his back against the wall of the cubicle until the fog sparkling in front of his eyes cleared.<p>

Light-headed, he hauled himself to his feet, flushed, and went out to the basin. He washed his hands, rinsed his mouth out, and washed again for good measure. His nail beds looked pale as he towelled his hands vigorously on the rough paper from the dispenser. He went back to the mirror and checked his reflection. The mucosal linings of his eyes and the inside of his lower lip were pale too. His skin was ghostly.

He buttoned his labcoat, went back to his residents, dispatched them to duties, and took an early break.

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><p>It had been his imagination, but that didn't mean he was right. There was a first time for everything and this time his diagnosis was off by a mile. House told himself that until twelve o clock.<p>

When he limped into the hospital, just in time for lunch, Wilson was already in the cafeteria. Amidst a room full of staff who, beneath scrubs and lab coats, were a few stitches away from naked doctoring, he wore the full suit of his oncologist's armour. His face was set like a sleepwalker's. He was drinking a litre of orange juice and taking an iron supplement.

House got a coffee and joined him at the table, making up a health kick with which to mock his friend. He made Wilson roll his eyes, but couldn't raise a laugh.

He wasn't wrong. He was a narcissistic, navel-gazing idiot not to have thought of it before.

The smell of the wards followed Wilson when he left the hospital. The metallic catch-in-the-throat taste of Cisplatin mingled with the oil leaking from somewhere underneath House's clapped out Dodge. The damp wall underneath the leaking air conditioner in his apartment stank of mothballs and bacterial like necrotic neoplastic ulcers and rotting of abdominal cancers. When he kissed the sweat off House's skin, he tasted the tears of his latest terminal patient's wife.

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><p>Wilson's phone rang in the muggy afterglow. House peeled his bare back off the clammy sofa cushions and hitched his jeans up, while Wilson scrambled off his knees, tucked himself back into his pleated pants and groped under his sticky shirt-tails for the cell. He hit speaker by mistake and his mother's voice came excitedly over the line.<p>

"Jimmy! At last! I've been calling for nearly a week. I got an email from Julie last Saturday – she said you two had some news...?"

The flush drained from Wilson's face and he sunk down amidst the empty Tai cartons and the beer bottles strewn across the coffee table. He turned the speaker off and said cautiously:

"Yes, we do."

Expectant gabbling spilled from the earpiece, the words all jumbled up. House slumped on the sofa and stared up at the ceiling fan cycling endlessly overhead whilst Wilson dashed her hopes in a quiet, regretful monotone.

The squawking grew fainter, as if she were aging by the second. Wilson's voice softened too. He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed shakily.

"You've _got_ grandkids, mama. Willow and Ira. David's. Yes, I know Danny never will. I well, maybe... No, not with Julie... _No._ There's no chance of reconciliation... No! Don't it's too soon, please..." He flinched visibly and House's chest ached as Wilson cast him an agonised look through his fingers. His voice stuttered, repeating, stalling: "A-am I seeing anyone else?"

House stared at him, willed him. _Tell her._ Tell her. _**Tell her**__._

"No," Wilson muttered, eyes closing, shoulders bowing, and a lock of his soft brown hair slinking forward to flop disconsolately over his face. "I'm not... Okay, okay... What's her name? Yolana...Yeah, it's pretty... Yes, I'll meet her... Next week? At the Synagogue singles' night? _Really?_ Yes... Okay... Yes, I'll bring her back with me for dinner... Yeah, sure, I'm looking forward to seeing you too."

He closed the phone, shoved it roughly into his jacket pocket and lurched to his feet, unable to look at House.

"I-I've got to go. Early meeting tomorrow. You know how it is."

He stuffed his feet into his loafers and knotted them in hasty jerks that he would normally swore would ruin the laces.

"You're a wuss," House told him, tiredly.

Wilson turned on him with a look of soft-eyed longing and matched it with the heartfelt tone that House could have sworn they both had to be drunk to hear.

"I know," he said, as if he'd meant to say three words rather than two.

Taken aback, House reminded him gruffly: "You're also a _doctor_."

The hall lights, reflected, upside down, swam in the glistening film over Wilson's eyes as he looked back at the open door.

"Doesn't make sense, does it? That I'm _still_ a disappointment."

TBC


	3. Chapter 3

**Rock Songs and Razorblades**

**Part Three**:

_Schara._ Fireplace. A place of fire. The Greeks were right about that. Most wounds deep enough to cause fibrous tissue to form burned like a bitch. Grinding the heel of one hand into the depression of scarred flesh and muscle knotted over bone, House rolled his pill bottled up and down the staircase of his fingers in the other. He'd returned to the Diagnostics office by moonlight and sat at his desk in the circle of white light cast by a single lamp. On the desk in front of him, printouts of Wilson's medical files were spread open like chest of a cadaver. For the hundredth time since he'd realised Wilson was sick, House dissected them methodically, alias by alias. The black type bled before his tired eyes.

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><p>Wilson drove back to his hotel, tore open the envelope in the car and signed along the dotted line. He crossed out his temporary address on the front and rewrote the return address between the scribbled lines: Pellettieri, Rabstein and Altman, divorce attorneys. He gave the envelope back to the desk clerk to post, went straight up to his bathroom and locked himself in.<p>

He'd never wanted to stay at Baker Street so badly. He'd never deserved to less.

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><p>Eight hours and forty-two years from when he'd begun, House put down his half-empty pill bottle and picked up the phone, blocked his own caller id and dialled.<p>

"You want to joyride my Repso?"

"House?" Wilson sounded wide-awake and startled. "You okay? It's four in the morning."

"'Cause, y'know, all the cool kids are having a midlife crisis these days."

"Are you okay? How much have you had to drink?"

"You've got to borrow the leathers too."

"Where are you? Are you okay? I'll come pick you up."

"And if you scratch it, you pay for the respray."

"House, stop this. I don't want to borrow your damn bike! _Are you okay?_"

"_I_ am," House said and put the phone down.

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><p>He slept on the yellow Ottoman in his office, woke early and watched the sunrise from his balcony. Not long after, Wilson's Volvo pulled into the lot. House prowled the corridors in search of the mythical meeting and found Wilson in the gym, working away to Bayside's "How to Fix Everything."<p>

"You lied," he announced, throwing the glass doors open.

Wilson stumbled and barely kept his footing on the running machine. He tapped a button and slowed the treadmill to a pace to which he could jog. The frantic whir of the mechanisms quieted.

"Yeah, I'm Don Quixote." He tugged self-consciously at the right sleeve of his grey t-shirt and took up a grip on the support bars. The muscles in his forearms bulged; the skin was smooth and tanned. House studied the places he couldn't see: strong runner's legs beneath grey track pants, the hard lines of Wilson's chest and abdomen, the powerful curve of his upper arms. "There was a message for me when I got back to the hotel. The meeting was cancelled. The chairman has heat stroke."

"What was the message delivered with, a two by four?" House pointed his cane at the white strip of bandage just visible beneath the hem of the t-shirt sleeve.

Wilson didn't look down. "I slipped in the shower this morning, cut my arm and wrenched my shoulder."

"You didn't call the E.R."

"For a minor laceration?" Wilson panted, forehead wrinkled in convincing confusion.

"For a transfusion. You have dyspnea and muscle fatigue."

Another scoff. "I'm running, House. Breathlessness and lactic acid build-up are pretty standard side-effects."

"Doesn't cause koilonychia. Your fingernails look like teaspoons. You're anaemic. Iron deficiency."

"I know. You thought I was taking the ferrous sulfate because it's yummy? Vaughn picked it up during my last physical."

"When was that?" House asked sceptically.

Wilson flashed him a look that was all irritation and cynicism. "A few days ago; I don't know if he's charted it yet. Get your nose out of my medical records."

He tapped a button again and the treadmill began to spin faster, louder. House shook his head and turned for the door. Over his shoulder, he said:

"Next time stay over and shower with me. Your rabbi was right when he told you autoeroticism was bad for you."

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><p>He went back through Wilson's medical records that evening. At around nine p.m. the missing physical report mysteriously appeared, the signature a sludgy, illegible mess. House closed and shredded the files, left his assigned patient malingering in the hands of his fellows and went home. He sat on his couch, watched a slasher movie he'd rented and forgotten to return, drank a whole bottle of bourbon, and took too much Vicodin.<p>

For the first time since the heat wave had started, his leg hurt so much he felt sick.

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><p>Wilson tossed and turned in his sleep, dreaming of cases: a chaotic montage of yellow skin and ruddy palms, sunken faces, tumbleweeds of hair, brightly coloured scarves, salt-streaked blotchy cheeks, biopsy punches, microscopes, slides, infusion pumps whirring, sagging bags, funeral clothes, towers of charts, stacks of blue files, machines humming and bleeping, children, balding, dying, crying <em>daddy, daddy<em> and screaming, screaming, scream—

He woke with a silent one hanging on his lips, got up and stumbled into the hotel bathroom. He opened the cupboard over the sink and, with the sickening sense that he was taking too much, got down the kit of medication he prescribed for himself.

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><p>In the morning, Wilson dosed himself up with Tylenol, called in sick to work and went out to the wooden porch in the suburbs of Princeton. He hunched over his knees in a stuffed wicker chair and stared into the murky depths of his coffee, as he spoke, halting, wary, and frustrated.<p>

His latest therapist reclined on the swinging sofa. A faint breeze blew in from the fields and stirred her wavy copper-brown hair back from her face. Dust had caught in the faint notches between her brows. She scribbled on her prescription pad, pressed against one upraised knee.

"I'm prescribing a test course of Naltrexone," she said quietly. "In addition to the Prozac. I—"

"You think I'm addicted."

Wilson slammed his coffee down and went over to one of the wooden pillars. He glared into the swampy darkness amidst the scattered forestry hemming in her land. She tore the paper off, the seams parting stickily behind him.

"Did you manage a week without it?"

"Yes."

The ropes creaked patiently as she worked the swing to and fro, one bare foot pushing against the boards. Her silence niggled him.

"A working week," he amended, grudgingly. "Several days ago."

"We arranged seven days, not five."

"It's been twenty years! I can't just—" he stopped himself with a dismissive gesture. "It's not an addiction. I know what that looks like."

"Speaking of, House called before you did."

Wilson's stomach dropped. He raised his chin and affected puzzlement. "He did?"

"He wanted to speak to my husband about the results of your annual physical."

"Why would he—?"

"Why would my husband's name be on your file? He doesn't know and I suspect that I'd rather not." She rose and came up behind him, long summer skirt swishing like the tail of a soaked cat. "You're protected by patient confidentiality, so far as it goes, but _I won't lie for you_, James. Don't put me in a situation where I have to choose between lying and the law. It's a poor excuse not to trust me."

"I do trust you."

She shook her head and studied a leaf floating on the breeze, its veins standing out sharp and clear on tissue paper fine greenness.

"I'd rather you didn't lie to me either."

Wilson ducked his head and rested his brow against the pillar, lacing his hands around it loosely. His voice came raw, honest now and uncertain.

"I'm trying, but…"

"You don't trust the idea of me." She laid a gentle hand on his shoulder, her grip firm and sure. Wilson studied the prescription when she held it out; the paper fluttered between her prosthetic fingers like something trapped.

"Is this an ultimatum? If I don't take it, I can't come and see you any more?"

She shook her head, calm, clear eyes trained on him. "I'm not Sam or Bonnie or Julie and I'm not one of those damn amateurs who sent you away. I haven't given up here. Have you?"

TBC…


	4. Chapter 4

**Rock Songs and Razorblades**

**Part Four:**

Late that morning Wilson returned to the hospital via a high street pharmacy. He'd changed his mind by the time he walked through PPTH's glass doors and crossed to the in-hospital pharmacy alongside the Clinic. Taking the bottle he'd been given out of his pocket, he tore the part of the label with his name on off the Naltrexone and it to the pharmacist to dispose of the pills. As he watched Marco toss them away, it occurred to him that he should have kept them. So much for trying.

Habit – or maybe unwilling empathy – made him check the leather-bound logbook on the desk. Surprise, surprise, he discovered that House had signed out three weeks worth of pills in just under two. He ordered Marco not to dispense any further refills without phoning his office to double check that the signature on any forthcoming scripts was his, not an irksomely accurate replica, and went back to work.

* * *

><p>House sulked in a chair with his feet up on the conference table, his earbuds wedged in to block out his fellows protests about their pain in the ass patient, and rebounded his lacrosse ball into the dividing wall between his DDX room and Wilson's office. He tracked its vigorous path with a scowl. He'd run out of medical information, pills and proof simultaneously and the scientist in him hated fishing for a diagnosis.<p>

The man in him needed the excuse of the MD, though. The only reason this had his attention at all was because it was _Wilson._ If he was right, this was an open-and-shut case. Boring. Unless Wilson turned out to be looking for an alien chip inside him like House's recent Chimera patient, the kid with Vanishing Twin Syndrome, or searching for hydraulic lines under his skin, it wasn't going to be the stuff of journal articles.

What it was was a knock to House's pride. Elastic band fixation was a symptom. A symptom of another symptom of at least one mood disorder that he already knew Wilson had. He practically had to have been _trying_ not to notice for this long. As if on cue, his ipod cruelly shuffled onto _Nazarath's_ rock remix of B&F Bryant's "Love Hurts." He snapped it off with a wince.

* * *

><p>The pharmacist refused to refill his prescription. Just before two, House slammed into Wilson's office in a rip-roaring rage.<p>

"You. Goddamn. Lying. Hypocrite!" he bellowed, scaring the patient sitting in the visitor's chair to her feet.

She squeaked and clapped both hands over her head as the draught from the air conditioner snatched at her headscarf.

"House!" Wilson exclaimed, irritated but without the gall to feign surprise. "I'm in the middle of-"

House swept a cursory glance over the patient. "Breast cancer. Post chemo, double mastectomy and radiation. Referral case." He narrowed his eyes and sniffed cruelly. "A bit got missed and it's fulminating"

The patient blenched and Wilson scraped his chair back.

"Outside," he growled through clenched teeth. "_Now._"

House stormed out onto the balcony and held the door pointedly, just in case Wilson got any ideas about locking him out here to fume. He tapped his cane whilst Wilson apologised profusely to his patient and excused himself. When he strode out into the blazing air, his face was as dark as House's own.

"What the _hell_?" he demanded, jamming his hands on his hips.

House was so livid he almost laughed. What the hell? What the hell right did Wilson have to be asking him what the hell? He was the one holding House's medication hostage – his _legitimate, prescribed_ medication, medication for a genuine _physical _pain condition, medication for which _nothing else worked_, medication that enabled him to just barely _function –_ all the while playing hack and slash with his own circulatory system. He bared his teeth, readying a tirade.

"You _cut..._me off!" he snarled, changing direction mid-sentence as he noticed Brown standing on the next balcony over. "I'm in pain, you jerk! I'm down to my last two pills and that's it? You're not going to let me have anymore?"

"Until," Wilson interjected loudly, a bullish expression firmly wedged over whatever glimpse of alarm House thought he'd seen, "You get some blood-work done. The panels from the rehab facility you checked into six months ago came back with the test results for a pregnant woman!"

Ah. House sucked his teeth and shifted uncomfortably, thrown onto his back foot.

"Funny story" he began, but Wilson shushed him with a curt, frustrated gesture.

"I don't want to know who else you were paying off to get you out of detoxing," he said flatly. "You'll get your pills when you can provide me with genuine objective data that your liver isn't dissolving into a puddle of slime."

House swore under his breath. "There's nothing wrong with my liver!"

"Prove it," Wilson challenged, his voice descending to that steely pitch of calm that meant he was absolute implacable.

House was back to wanting to spit with annoyance.

"And what do I do _until_ then?" he demanded peevishly

"Have you eaten anything today?" Wilson pulled his pager out of his pocket and began to punch in numbers.

"No," House muttered, just daring him to make a comment about Vicodin suppressing the appetite. He saw the thought cross Wilson's face, but he fabricated enough decency not to gloat over his victory.

"I'll contact the lab now. You can go down there now and get the blood drawn. I'll insist that it's done as a priority. If there's no cause for concern, you'll have your pills by five this afternoon."

"And until then?" House repeated bitterly.

"I'll write you a script for a muscle relaxant and you can get an over the counter anti-inflammatory, ibuprofen, nothing with acetaminophen in it," Wilson said, sounding quite unreasonably calm about torturing his supposed best friend for the next six hours. "You've got more than enough opiates in your systems to tide you over for a little while."

He sent the page and House scoffed in disgust.

"Got a scalpel on you?" he snapped, partly to see if a psychological jab would work where reason had failed and partly because it gave him a perverse pleasure to see if he _could_ make Wilson flinch. "If you're that hung up on phlebotomy the gating mechanism makes for a quick, primitive"

Wilson's eyes hardened.

"Don't be an idiot," he said sternly. "Get the liver panel done and you'll get your drugs. Or you can stand here and yell some more, _then_ get your liver panel done _and_ _then_ get your drugs. But I have another patient waiting. Excuse me."

He strode over to the door and opened it, turning back to say over his shoulder, loud enough for his patient to hear:

"And we discussed the need for you to have some tests done the last time I wrote you a prescription. You were just hoping I'd forget. Obviously, I haven't and if you've gone through them faster than I expected because you're taking more than the prescribed amount, then you've still had plenty of time to arrange for the tests yourself. That makes _me_ neither a liar nor a hypocrite."

He paused on the last word, his expression growing quizzical.

"And you might want to look up the definition of that last one too. I'm not sure you know what it means."

House stood on the balcony under the searing sun and second-guessed his diagnosis for the fourth time.

* * *

><p>"Galen was right," House announced, as Wilson opened the door into the morgue three days later.<p>

"Claudius Galen?" Wilson asked, leaning against the jamb and tucking away his pager.

"No, Galen from _Babylon 5_," House scoffed, around a mouthful of crisps. He glanced somewhat edgily at Wilson and added: "The 'I don't hold a grudge, because I have no surviving enemies' Galen."

Wilson pressed his lips together to hide a smile. "Or, in this case, because your enemy accepted the blood panel in ransom and surrendered your meds before you ran out and seventy-two hours later you're done pouting about it. By the way, don't emergency page me to the morgue. It's hard to make up an excuse to get out of a phone call for a patient who's already dead."

There was no dignified way to answer any of that, so House ignored it. It was not _his_ addiction he was inclined to talk about, although, in a pinch, his work ethics would do.

"Yes, Aelius Galen," he corrected, pedantic and a little impatient. "Philosopher and physician extraordinaire."

"Okay," Wilson closed the door and, with a quick glance over his shoulder, locked it and closed the window blind too. "To which of his two hundred plus _extant_ treatise, incorporating over three million words and twenty-two translated volumes are you referring? Or is this just a generic 'Galen was right' about everything?"

"He was right about venesection," House said, watching his friend's countenance carefully for any sign that he might be nervous about where the conversation was going. Wilson joined him at the gurney, but remained disappointingly baffled.

"I have a patient with haemochromotosis," House explained, temporarily transferring his attention to the contents of the paper bag Wilson was getting his lunch out of. "Doomed to purge a pint of blood once a week for the rest of his life.

"Little jerk deserves it," he added grimly. "I just got read the riot act by Cuddy for suggesting he do it at home in a hot bath instead of coming into the hospital."

"You're campaigning for the medicalisation of self-harm in adolescents via Galenic theory?" Wilson pulled up another of the mortician's pneumatic stools and sat down on the opposite side of the metal gurney, shaking his head. "Cuddy should have read you the ethics code instead."

"Do no harm, Hippocrates, oath, blah, blah, blah."

House waved that away as irrelevant. He was still somewhat nonplussed by Wilson's unflappable audacity on the chosen subject. His friend had a guilt complex the size of their home continent and a reflexive paranoia about social taboos that should have had him at least a little twitchy by now. Evidently once the puberty hormones wore off, so did the tendency to make an after-school special out of the matter.

Somehow, he doubted that Wilson ever had.

"I'm not advocating handing out razorblades with free condoms," he persisted, studying Wilson intently over the rim of his Coke can. "Trust me, this is a one of a kind deal. I think even his mother would sign off on it if I wrote out a script recommending self-medication with any sharp object – even with the risk of accidental euthanasia. Kid's a menace."

Wilson chuckled as he unwrapped his sandwiches. "And this, coming from _you._ Who is this brat: the bastard child of Stalin and Hitler?"

"And Pinochet, Il-Sung, Franco, Mussolini and Zedong," House agreed. "I recommended a non-red meat diet too," he added, with a slightly vindictive smirk as he remembered the kid's apoplexy. "Choleric temperament. I'm getting Cameron to Paintshop Pro a flyer to go out to all the food outlets that says 'please do not feed the demon' on it."

He stole the bacon out of Wilson's sandwich. Sighing, Wilson passed it over and picked up an apple instead.

"_Cameron_ doesn't like him?" He bit and chewed thoughtfully, his bushy eyebrows canted in surprise. "This I have to see, Petruchio."

Perfect. Couldn't've gone better if it had been scripted. House bit the inside of his lip to keep himself from smiling.

"I'll fix you up to do his first venipuncture," he said casually. "What's a little exsanguination amongst friends?"

Annoyingly, Wilson merely rolled his eyes.

* * *

><p>Less than twenty minutes later, the food was forgotten and the stools overturned. House shuddered, hands kneading over the broad muscles of Wilson's back under his t-shirt, while Wilson palmed him slowly within the rough enclosure of his jeans. The soft wet sounds of their mouths working together echoed in the steel-walled chamber.<p>

"Wait, mmph...wait," Wilson murmured, dragging himself out of the kiss and reversing until House, reluctantly, let go. Wilson stood back panting, his bright brown hair tousled and his lips raw with stubble burn. "I need..." he made a feeble attempt at coherency and abandoned it with a non-specific two-handed gesture. "Back in a moment."

He took a shuddering breath, pulled himself together and disappeared into the disabled bathroom beside the office. House groaned and gripped the edge of the gurney he was sitting on.

"You couldn't've peed _before_?" he yelled, stroking himself restlessly through his open zipper.

"Not...quite..." Wilson made an indistinguishable sound, somewhat muffled by the door and shouted back: "Forget it. Glycerine and restrooms are the _not_ hot part of this. Shut up and give me a second."

House jerked his head up to blink pointlessly at the requisite stick figures on the sign. Okay. _That_ he hadn't been expecting. He knew what he'd signed on for when he and Wilson hooked up for the fifth time in twelve years. All chick flick sentiments aside, he was not only just another notch in the proverbial headboard, but one that underscored Wilson's ultimate failure to be a good little Jewish American. Three of the previous four times, that had come with certain exclusions in the sex department. More startled than he had any right to be, given some of the things he'd had to say about that, House waited until the door reopened and Wilson stepped out, drying his hands on a green paper towel, before he said quietly:

"You changed your mind again."

Wilson flushed and said somewhat sarcastically: "Well, you do make a good argument. I've been divorced three times. I don't have a beard. I sit on the organ transplant committee." He paused and shrugged, looking suddenly exhilarated and rather smug. "And I think I just got out of that dinner with Yolana, so yeah. I changed my mind again."

House's lips parted, half-forming silent syllables that he quickly swallowed. It was stupid to feel even a little hopeful. After all this time he knew better than to expect any sort of commitment out of Wilson and that was aside from the fact that he was fairly sure it wasn't his _headboard_ that Wilson had been keeping score on. It was one thing to know he was going to get stood up for a woman. Quite another to suspect he was often being stood up because the man was busy passing out.

His libido didn't seem to agree with him, though, and whatever his expression was it didn't apparently show what he was thinking_._ Wilson's half-proud, half-apprehensive smile turned into a full-blown grin and he walked swiftly across the room, twisted his fingers into the front of House's t-shirt and pulled him into another deep, exploratory kiss.

"Now," he said, breath ghosting warmly along House's jaw. "You can make fun of me some more or..."

Foil crackled as he pushed a small square packet and a squashed tube of unbranded lubricant into House's hand.

"This," House muttered, sealing their lips together tightly. _Definitely this._

* * *

><p>"<em>Petit mort<em>," House gasped, sweat running into his eyes.

His yellow Harley t-shirt was concertinaed up around his armpits, his jeans were at half-mast, and the long muscles of Wilson's back flexed and arched against his abdomen. Wilson's striped blue shirt was rucked up into a sweaty knot and House dug his fingers into Wilson's bare hip to thrust harder, the rest of his sentence jolted out over the raw primal sound of skin smacking on skin.

"Little death...it means...orgasm."

Both Wilson and the gurney groaned, wedged against the cabinets bolted to the wall.

"I swear, I _will_ kill _you_," Wilson rasped, his gentle voice rough and increasingly frantic as he clutched at the edge of the countertop to brace himself.

House tightened his grip on the rail of the gurney and used his arms to get the leverage he needed to plunge in, smooth and deep. Metal rattled against metal and Wilson cried out, tucking his head down near his shoulder.

"Now...is not...the moment...to start teaching me French!" he gritted out.

"Not giving you a lecture," House swore, pausing to suck hard on the patch of skin his breath had moistened near Wilson's carotid, chin scraping over the starched collar of his shirt. He pulled off just before he could leave a bruise and continued breathlessly. "'S a well known fact that...sex and death...are related. Not least...because...of the endorphin rush...also triggered by stress, pain, excitement...and injury."

"Thanks for that recap...of first year...med school. I thought...you wanted – oh _God_ – your patient to suffer...not – holy _hell_, House, do that again! – get him off"

Wilson faltered and flung a suspicious look over his shoulder. For a moment, House thought he'd clicked; the sudden darkening of his eyes and the flicker of anxiety that crossed his face were promising.

Then Wilson said warily: "If now's the moment...you tell me...you're into – ow! No, okay, that's better – erotic asphyxiation...I'm _not._"

House shook his head quickly, leaning down to kiss the uncertainty off Wilson's profile. He was starting to wonder if he was wrong about the whole concept of a dirty little secret.

"Good," Wilson muttered, swiping his tongue briefly inside House's lips to tease over the roof of his mouth. He broke the kiss to suck in a long, ragged breath and finished provokingly, "Now, less of the talking, hmm?"

House could live with that. He was shaking so hard he was risking a tongue injury trying. He kept moving, quicker now, listing sideways, hips stuttering. Wilson made a startled sound and shivered suddenly.

"Hoh boy," he whispered, pressing back against House and half-freezing beneath him. "I think I'm gonna...I think I can..."

He sounded almost afraid. House trusted his weight to his dodgy leg for a second to cinch his other arm tightly around Wilson's chest and hold on. He'd felt like he was falling apart the first time he'd come that way too.

"C'mon," he murmured into the shell of Wilson's ear. "Wuss."

Wilson gasped and jerked and almost collapsed underneath him. The rippling contractions of his muscles pulled House over the edge too.

He stroked Wilson's cock until they were both spent, his knuckles brushing up against the fist Wilson had clasped around the front of his trousers, firmly keeping them from slipping any lower than the inch of thigh below his balls. No, House decided, head spinning he leaned heavily against Wilson's back and came down in a lovely, fuzzy rush of endogenous opiod polypeptide compounds. He wasn't wrong. There was no reason to be _that_ concerned about propriety in case a nurse or Cuddy walked in on them. The door was locked, after all.

* * *

><p>"Why are you wearing that shirt?" House asked, as they were setting their crumpled clothes to rights.<p>

Wilson made a vain attempt to smooth down the creases House had scrunched into it.

"Uh, because I _like_ this shirt," he suggested.

"It's got stripes."

"Yes."

"You look like a Pierotte."

Wilson shot him a baffled glare.

"It's happy, you're sad," House clarified. "Bright, cheerful colours on you are contradictory."

Wilson eyed his rumpled sky blue t-shirt pointedly. "Sorry for infringing on your trademark."

House ceded that.

"I meant, what's happened to your white shirts?" he persevered. "The hotel does your washing within twenty-four hours, so they're not at the Laundromat. You don't buy shirts that are dry-clean only, so they didn't get shredded by the retards who run that environmentally friendly circus you frequent..."

Wilson frowned at him. "Why the sudden interest in my wardrobe?"

House shrugged. "Well, I know you're not leaving clothes at my apartment."

That came out resentful enough that he wanted to bite his tongue off. He silently damned himself for a fool. Wilson had a habit of tucking tail whenever things got too serious and if that wasn't a way to precipitate it he didn't know what was. Sighing, House suddenly realised he was heartily sick of this hit-and-run routine.

"Forget it," he said shortly and headed for the door.

"No." Wilson stopped him on the threshold. He raked a hand through his rumpled hair and threw House an edgy, complicated expression. His voice was soft, almost apologetic as he said: "I don't know how many times I have to tell you this, House. I'm not leaving them at anyone else's either."

* * *

><p>It occurred to him, as he reached the top of the elevator ride to his floor, that the psych textbooks usually recommended a much simpler method: a gentle invitation to come and to talk. House grinned, sharp and satisfied. There was no reason he couldn't do that. He was a doctor, after all.<p>

TBC...


	5. Chapter 5

**Part Five**:

This was getting ridiculous. Wilson scoured his desk for a pencil sharpener. Freshly showered, his filthy gym clothes cycling in one of the laundry room washers downstairs, and the last corner of his cafeteria breakfast's whole wheat toast held between his teeth, he pushed the file he'd been annotating aside and yanked open the drawer in search of another _pencil_. A half dozen relatively new ones, all with the graphite point worked down to the wood were scattered across his top drawer. Was he really going to have to go down to supplies _again_ this week?

Abandoning the patient file temporarily, he snagged a packet of post-it notes and a pen, scrawling on the top a list of office equipment that he'd somehow used up or mislaid over the last ten days. _Pencils._ _Sharpeners._ _Paper shredder. Mini-guillotine. Hole-puncher. Stapler._ _Scissors. _Wait a second...

Leaning back in his chair, Wilson tapped the end of his pen against his teeth as he reread the list with suspicion gnawing at his gut. Setting the items down, he ran a slow, methodical inventory over his stationery. Pencils aside, and the only reason he needed those was because all three of his sharpeners had mysteriously disappeared into thin air, every single item on the list contained some kind of blade or mechanism for injury. There was no way that was a coincidence.

A swift glance at the clock showed that it was seven thirty a.m; he was safe for at least another three hours. Wilson pushed the chair back from his desk and stepped out into the hall. Glancing habitually over his shoulder to check for cunning eyes peering in through the window onto his balcony, then up and down the corridor, he tramped grimly down to the adjoining office.

Diagnostics was dark, all blinds and doors closed, lights out. That didn't mean a damn thing. Heart stuttering in his chest and the sick headache he associated with a hangover thumping between his temples, he opened the DDX room. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up as he quickly crossed the room, expecting at any moment for House to leap up from some unseen corner and hold him at cane-point with a cry of _Ahah!_ Using another of the spare keys that Cuddy had given him, after discovering House kept them on the same chain as his main ones, he unlocked the door to the office.

The odds of being sprung here were substantially higher. Wilson flung the door back and set both hands on the frame, ready to blast House for tomfoolery when he had work to do and bury House's latest pet theory in a blackly glorious row. He was, he realised, more than a little bit ticked by the theft and it had nothing to do with the inconvenience of trekking down to office supplies for another ridiculously protracted negotiation with the parsimonious clerk. He had never, in his life, been so unsanitary as to dismantle a _pencil sharpener_.

The room was empty, although he could now envision the sort of stunt that House had planned. He'd been plotting an ambush: a teddy bear in a neon tutu and black fishnet, strung up somewhere in the clinic with a stapler stuck in its paw. Or everything laid out ready for some lunatic ceremony for his team to walk past puzzling about all day, until Wilson came in unawares and stood turning colours in front of them. _Bastard._ Who needed an oncology ward, a psychotic brother, three divorces and a proclivity for anti-Semitic sodomy, when House all by himself was enough to drive anyone into a vice?

Striding across to the desk, Wilson quickly searched under the uppermost papers for any sign of his purloined stationery. The small environmental catastrophe here, strewn files with their pages mixed together, overdue insurance claims, printed emails, empty chocolate wrappers, a razor blade – of all things – from the last time House had tried snorting his Vicodin, six abandoned coffee mugs and a mouldering apple core yielded only the poor abused relics of House's own stationery. Unsticking his palm from whatever gunk was smeared all over the lid of House's laptop, Wilson opened the top drawer of his desk. There, glinting in the dim light through the balcony door, was every single one of his missing items.

The room wavered and blurred in front of him and the heat he'd grown accustomed to over the last month crashed over him in a sweltering wave. Dizzy, Wilson braced his hands on House's desk and lowered his head, eyes closed so that he didn't have to look again into the open drawer. Sweat broke out under his arms and slid down and stung the cuts on his bicep through the gauze covering. It wasn't a coincidence. House knew.

Swallowing hard, Wilson kneed the drawer closed with a dull thud. If House had walked in on him then and there, he would never have got the mixture of guilt and dread off his face in time. He lifted his head to confront the pitiless shadows of the empty office and, inexplicably, felt his stomach lurch with disappointment. House's cold blue eyes and his near vicious _you idiot_ would have been welcome, here, now, where if a showdown came of it he had a whole day's work with which to distract himself and could manufacture a reason to stay overnight, so that he wouldn't have to go home alone instead of to his_oh holy hell._ When had he started thinking of House as his boyfriend?

Where are you, high school? Wilson snorted to himself and pushed upright, hardly conscious of the way he straightened his clothes and reached up to rub the back of his neck to feel the sharp sting as the skin on his upper arm stretched taut over the muscle and tugged on the lacerated skin. Digging the crick out of his c-veterbrae, he crushed everything but the conviction that now he knew what House knew. At least he wouldn't be caught with his guard down. His mind already ticking over ways to play this off as nothing, he picked up House's pencil sharpener and left.

* * *

><p>By that afternoon, Wilson was beginning to wonder if House had bugged his office and knew exactly what he'd found. It was nearing four and absolutely nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Wilson felt physically ill with apprehension. His guts were cramping, his head throbbed and made his eyes ache, he'd had to hurry to the men's room three times in the last hour, and his pulse was jumping so hard it was making him light-headed. He'd been cornered by House in the elevator on his way back to oncology after rounds. But his friend had only pressed his cane tip against the button that would hold the doors closed and pulled him into a long, thorough kiss before charging out of the elevator in pursuit of his team. He'd done a consult for them, unmocked and unexposed. House had met him for lunch, tried to pinch his wallet, eaten his ice-cream, drunk his coffee and left with two handfuls of Wilson's fries. He'd done two hours in the clinic with visions of gory teddies dancing in his head, but none materialised. He was now back in his office with his paperwork and, from the silence next door, House was off tormenting a patient. If he dragged this out until tomorrow – or longer – Wilson thought he might actually break down and confess. It could be, of course, that that was exactly what House wanted.<p>

Giving up on his paperwork, Wilson got up and meandered about his office, trying to walk off the feeling that he was about to toss his cookies into the waste-paper basket. It was absurd to think House was trying to smoke him out with some strange conversations and stolen stationery. House wasn't exactly the sort of man who'd welcome an intimate confession, not if he had to be sensitive and couldn't string some creative commentary about it over the hospital in skywriting.

Stopping by the window, Wilson gouged the heels of his hands into his eye sockets in a vain attempt to stave off the increasing headache. His chest was starting to feel tight and he knew he was breathing too fast, too much. His fingers tingled with the urge to curl around the thin, cold shaft of a scalpel until they were just plain tingling so hard that he would have dropped it. It was then, teetering on the brink of a panic attack, that his office door crashed open.

Wilson started so violently that he aspirated spit and the first minute of House's cacophonous entrance was taken up by frantic coughing. House looked on critically, the door kept open by his cane, as he appeared to debate whether or not he needed to send for a gurney. Concluding that he didn't, he let the door slap closed.

"My patient," he announced, while Wilson clawed at his throat and stumbled across to the water cooler, "used to be a woman."

By a sheer feat of luck, Wilson managed not to inhale the water he'd sploshed into the paper cup. He gulped it down, blinked the pain tears out of his eyes, and gestured encouragingly.

"Go on."

"Had the surgery done in _Thailand_," House added, sounding suitably scandalised. "Taub's practically drooling over his cock, because there's almost no scarring. It's incredible work, actually. And it's got nothing to do with what's killing him." He tossed the file he'd brought with him onto Wilson's desk, knocking over a mug of newly sharpened pencils. "It wasn't testicular cancer, that lump was benign. It's _breast_ cancer. He's all yours now."

"Ooookay." Wilson blinked, baffled, although not by the diagnosis. "Then why did you say it like that? _Thailand?_"

"Misdirection." House prowled over to the desk and took up a perch on the edge of it, his sharp blue eyes roving over Wilson's slightly ragged appearance. "Can I have my sharpener back?"

Wilson's stomach lurched, but the panic attack had faded. "What makes you think I have it?"

"You left the doors to my DDX room unlocked on your way out this morning."

Had he? Well. That was a whole other kind of self-sabotage. Recalling his peculiar hope that he'd get caught that morning, Wilson couldn't help wondering if he'd done it on purpose. His stomach turned even more at that. _Perish the thought._ He did not, absolute _did not,_ intend to put himself in a position where he might be coerced into quitting. Frankly, he couldn't conceive of a way to do that without giving up his job to run a mobile home park somewhere in the Caribbean. He loved his job. _Loved_ it. It was just that, sometimes, he needed a little bit of a break...

Playing innocent for now, it was safer until he knew what was what, Wilson shrugged and pointed to the neat arrangement of supplies in the top corner of his desk.

"Sorry about that."

House nodded and picked up the sharpener. He tossed it into the air and caught it again. The blade gleamed briefly under the main light. Had that been deliberate? Much as he loved - _oh hell_, he _loved_ – House too, right now, literally right this second, he could have done with another bit of a break. The only, the _only_, way to get that without giving up on him was to...Wilson closed his eyes as the urge rolled over him again, sharp and strong.

_Not._ _At. Work_. Turning back to the window, his fingers slid to the elastic bands he kept looped around his wrist for times such as these. He plucked one back and, _snick_, let it twang against his skin. The hot sting flared down his arm and hand. He breathed into it, rode the momentary burn with relief, and turned to face House, calm once more.

The calm went into a tailspin of alarm as he realised that House was still studying him with that narrow-eyed triumph that he only wore when he had been completely, categorically proved right. Wilson's heart did a double thud and sweat began to prickle along his spine. He had said nothing, so he'd not slipped and brought House to his usual wild epiphany. Nor had he cracked and confessed. House had to have seen. _How_? Frantically, Wilson went over his actions. He'd turned his back to the window, brought his arms to his chest as if he were about to cross them. He _had_ coughed when he snapped the band, hadn't he? He _always_ coughed. Beneath it, the innocuous _snick_ of the band couldn't be heard.

"You don't _have_ a cough," House said, as if he'd read his mind.

And then it was happening, fast and serious and too soon for Wilson to figure out how to stop it. With a remarkable turn of speed for a crippled man, House crossed the room and grabbed Wilson's right arm. He jerked away automatically and, as a grim smile spread across House's face, realised it was the worst thing he could have done.

He tried to take it back, offering House his arm with a puzzled expression, as though he'd only just realised what was wanted. House took it, but there was a certainty in his blue eyes that Wilson didn't like one bit. He pushed the sleeve of Wilson's jacket and shirt back, exposing the bands. Then he hooked one finger under the nearest and let is _snick_ hard against Wilson's skin.

"_Ow!_ What was that for?"

He made a show of rubbing the red stripe that bloomed on his wrist, glaring at House, daring him to see through it. Did the words sound as hollow as he thought? He tried to hang onto the quietude the burn usually brought, but it was dissipating faster than usual.

"Oh, put some effort into it," House snorted. He tightened his fingers around Wilson's wrist, his grip bitingly uncomfortable. Wilson winced for real this time, trying to twist away from the hard, grinding pressure that brought no relief at all. "_There._ That's more convincing."

"What are you talking about? I took some bands off a stack of files this morning. There was nowhere to put them, so I slipped them on my wrist."

"Handy hint, Jimmy boy," House said, not letting off his grip in the slightest. "Never try to lie to another addict. Dead giveaway. We know all the tricks."

Wilson's heart, already in his throat, bumped up into his mouth. He got his tongue in a tangle and sputtered: "_What_ tricks?"

"Turn your back and cough, for starters. The fact that you only do it when someone's really pissing you off."

He let go abruptly, reached into his own jacket and pulled out the amber vial of pills. With deliberate slowness, he flipped the cap, shook out a Vicodin and popped it onto his tongue. He swallowed loudly. And, making as much of an unnecessary production of it as possible, coughed.

Wilson felt his knees go weak, as if he'd cut himself so deep he should have had a bag handy to donate blood. He supposed fainting would be one way out of the conversation. As firmly as he could, he insisted:

"I don't know what you're talking about."

House wielded an interrogative forefinger at him. "And there's another tell. You're never this slow on the uptake unless you're hiding something. Got to admit, it's a pretty big something. Social taboo and all that. Shall I say it for you? You're a cutter. Dr. Well-Adjusted is a furtive little wrist slitter."

Now _that_ was out of line. As if this whole conversation hadn't decimated all sense of personal boundaries. Royally pissed off, Wilson barked:

"I do _not_ cut my wrists!"

House sneered at him. "No, too obvious. Inner thigh, is it? Soles of your feet? It must be somewhere discreet. It doesn't show when you wear scrubs or running shorts."

"You're wrong."

"About the placement, maybe." House dissected him with a long, thorough look. He wasn't about to let this go.

"I've stopped," Wilson lied quickly. "I did itca littlecin college. After Danny ran away. That's...that's why the bands. It stops me going back to it."

"No, yes, yes and no," House retorted. Shifting more of his weight onto his cane, he held up his free hand and counted off on his fingers. "College is when you started, yes, and you use the bands as a substitute. But you haven't stopped." The curled lip became a thin, calculating smile. "The bands aren't to keep you stopped. They're a stop_gap_, something you use when you _can't_ cut." He frowned and added in a lower voice, "One of them, anyway." He shook his head and went on, brashly. "Red blood on a white shirt is a dead giveaway, isn't it?"

Wilson crossed his arms and lied. "I _have_ stopped."

"Wearing white shirts? Yes, and that's why. Cutting? No. You're too practiced. The turn and cough, the _immediate_, entirely plausible excuse for having bands on your wrist. Either you're o'ding on band-snapping or you're still cutting. A lot."

Wilson snorted. "You can't o'd on band-snapping. It does not physical damage at all. Vicodin, on the other hand..."

"You're not getting out of this on a deflection. Inner arm, isn't it? Upper right, so it doesn't compromise your dominant hand function at all. Do you leave the cuts open so that the sweat can trickle in and give you a little high now and again? Or do you tape a sterile dressing over them to make absolutely sure that they can't get infected?"

_Oh. Fuck._ House _knew._ Biting his tongue on another protest – that would only confirm this, after all – Wilson shook his head.

"You know, just when I think you can't possibly be any more inappropriate, you come out with something like this."

He backed away from the conversation and made his way toward his desk. He eschewed looking directly at House, fixating instead on the insignificant strands of a pot-plant waggling in the breeze from the air conditioner, as he let some of the hurt his friend's sharp-tongued ridicule had inflicted wash over his face. If he could physically bleed from some of the stripes House had just cut into him, he wouldn't need a scalpel at all.

"You're wrong," he said softly, assertively. "You missed this one. It happens. Let it g-"

"I did miss it."

Wilson looked up, startled. House had planted his cane in front of him and clasped both hands on the top of it. It was taking most of his weight and his hips were canted to the left, as though his leg was hurting him. He looked crestfallen.

"I thought of everything else," he went on, as if to himself, but a hollow laugh got caught up in it and the words sounded sad. "Cancer, if that t-shirt was hiding the bulge of a central line; AIDS; MS; ME; heart disease; liver failure; even Lupus. Went through all the horses and a whole herd of zebras too. I read all your medical records, including your aliases. Sam Lions, by the way, is a lame anagram: you have to use _all_ the letters. Will Jameson, on the other hand, is even worse. Although points for being so obvious I nearly didn't think of them this time. I thought of drink, drugs, gambling, nymphomania – which would at least have explained all the booty calls."

He gestured to the couch and Wilson's mouth dropped open. He shook his head, dumb. House's jaw flexed and he wagged his hand, dismissing his own rejection complex as though it were nothing. Wilson, it seemed, had done some serious damage of his own – with what he _didn't_ say.

"It wasn't until the heat-wave that I thought of this. Good thing I didn't have money riding on it." House let his hand fall to his side and studied Wilson, grim and tired. "I'm not wrong."

In the silence that followed, it seemed unreasonable that the birds continued gaily outside the window and that the bustle of the hospital went on beyond the doors. Distantly, Wilson was relieved to note that the DDX room through the wall was still silent; House had sent his team away before he began. It was just him here and House, locked in with his secret.

He'd been staring between House's eyes as he noticed all this. Now, they began to merge. The gaunt, lined, unshaven face became a blur of crags and a ceaseless, cavernous mouth. A piercing, cyclopsian eye bored into him, pinning him to empty air, pressing relentlessly. The room shifted like a Tilt-a-Whirl.

House strode across the room, rounded the desk and his fingers locked around Wilson's wrist again, holding on until the floor straightened out. His grip was as tight as before, but not so fierce. The warmth of his skin spread outwards, reassuring.

"You're an idiot."

House let go roughly enough to jerk his arm, make the cuts twinge and sting under their dressing. The cold beat of the air-conditioner chilled the place where his hand had been, started Wilson shivering in the filtered draft. House set off for the door, anger circling around him like a private vanguard. But the rest of his army could be deployed anywhere. There was no way, _no way_, House would let this go. He'd probe and sneak and hack in and pry until he found proof. Wilson was good at hiding this; he'd practiced long enough. But there were scars and his scalpels, there was a whole process, and someday, somehow, House would find it. Even if he had to spike every coffee machine in the hospital with sleeping pills, strip Wilson naked and take photographs to prove it. He'd do it. But what would he do _with_ it?

"I-I cover them," he called out, stopping House with his fingers inches from the doorknob. His voice rattled as his teeth started to chatter. He squared his shoulders and braced himself against the rushes of hot and cold shivers that flew over and under his skin as his adrenaline rocketed.

To his relief, House stopped. He glanced around, eyes passing over Wilson's face, but settled elsewhere as he turned around.

"You're telling me so I won't rat on you to Cuddy."

Wilson squeezed his eyes closed. The thought of what was on the line if she ever found out: a psychiatric evaluation, records in his medical history, his permanent filec He could lose his job. Get blackballed. House had been right: no one liked having a sick doctor; a fucked-up, sick-in-the-head doctor would be even worse. The bands itched against his wrist. He clenched his fists with the effort not to tug on one and nodded reluctantly.

"Yes."

House contemplated him silently, a look in his eye that Wilson could only describe as old. He nodded shortly. He reached for the door handle again. Just when Wilson was sure he was going to walk out without another word, House stopped and looked over his shoulder.

"You've been keeping me off the transplant list for years," he said quietly, the solemnity of his tone leaving no doubt in Wilson's mind that this wasn't a non-sequitor. "You're good at it. But you can't lean on me that way." He waggled his cane, a solid, convenient metaphor. "If you get this wrong, then I've got no one. _Don't_ fuck it up."

TBC...


	6. Chapter 6

**Rock Songs and Razorblades.  
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**Part Six:**

"So, how does it work? Do you lock yourself in the bathroom with a razor blade and a rock song?"

"Hysterical, House." Wilson covered his mouth while he finished chewing a bite of pizza and rolled his eyes. "I'm not a fourteen year old kid with runny eyeliner and an existential angst complex, following the latest high school fad. It would probably be illegal to accept an invitation into my hotel room this late if I were."

"Fortunately for me, you're a forty-two year old boy wonder with an _atlas_ complex and an egodystonic compulsion that he's been hiding _since_ it was a high school fad," House countered, smirking.

Wilson sighed. "Did you come here to mock me for spending twenty years in the closet or for wasting blood that would be better donated to the bank?"

"Why can't I do both?"

No reason, if experience were a thing to judge by. No longer hungry, Wilson tossed the remains of his slice back in the box and closed the lid on it. It had been a bad idea, letting House in when he'd turned up at the hotel with pizza and a six-pack. He'd been so damn relieved to see him, he hadn't thought through the prospect of an ensuing satirical epic in his own honour. He'd given House enough material to sustain one of Homeric proportions.

"I don't suppose you'd settle for just doing me?" he asked, not entirely hopeful.

"Wouldn't leave without," House assured him.

"Great," Wilson muttered, half-heartedly scrolling through the next skin-flick options on pay-per-view as the credits rolled. It was all well and good, he supposed, but he'd gone soft the moment House brought this up. House eyed him thoughtfully.

"Okay, so it's not algolagnia."

"Whoa." Wilson held up the remote and his other hand defensively. "My cock and a scalpel don't ever need to be in the same sentence."

He shuddered and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to dig the image out from behind his eyes.

"That transsexual you're treating is in the club," House remarked.

He dug Wilson's discarded slice of pizza out of the box and gnawed on it, watching him out of the corner of his eye.

"So are you," Wilson retorted, elbowing House's left forearm significantly.

The long scars leftover from his own self-medication strategies during the detox bet they'd made nine months earlier were fading, but still visible. House held out his arm so that they gleamed in the light of the TV and flexed the hand he'd broken with a pestle the same week.

"It's not a blood brotherhood," he pointed out.

Wilson snorted. "Perish the thought." He felt House's eyes rake him, imagining what scars he might be hiding under his clothes and shifted uncomfortably. Only half conscious of what he was doing, he dug his thumbnail into the tender underside of his right arm. "I don't want to talk about this."

"I don't either."

House finished the pizza and set the box on the floor. Shutting off the TV with the remote, he stretched out on the double bed, half-sat up against the pillows, and folded his arms behind his head.

"Show me."

Wilson startled, taken aback. "What?"

"The scars, Wilson." House's voice was reassuringly neutral. "I've seen everything else."

He _touched_ everything else, outside and in. Wilson sucked in a breath nervously. He was still trying to get used to that. He studied House's serious face and deliberated. There were a thousand reasons he hadn't wanted House to ever see them. The least of which was not that he might as well have handed him his prescription pad and a carte blanche to forge his signature whenever he felt like it. But it was too late to beg a mulligan and pretend none of this had ever happened. He wrestled with a guilt-inducing sense of relief before, finally, he nodded.

He could taste his own heartbeat as he slowly peeled off his green polo neck, baring himself to the waist in front of House for the first time. He was conscious of the way the city lights, piercing through the dim glass of the window, raked his skin. His stomach rolled, that dip-swoop-sick-dizzy shocky feeling that tautened all his muscles, made him feel virginial, at once exposed and eerily excited by the plummeting of personal barriers. Then House reached across and switched on the bedside lamp and suddenly he was just naked and scared in the bald bright light.

If House had reached straight for the white square that still shrouded his secret, Wilson might have bolted. He closed his eyes, shutting away the steady blue spotlights slowly sweeping over his chest, and sought equilibrium in deep careful breaths. He barely managed three, before House let out a long low whistle.

"_Wow_. Have you been taking steroids?"

"Hey!" Wilson's eyes snapped open and he gawked at House in a mixture of familiar disbelief and irritation. "You don't get to accuse me of more than one kind of self-destructive behaviour in the same conversation! No, I am not taking steroids and, yeah, I'll do a blood panel to prove it to you."

"What _are_ you doing?"

Long guitarist's fingers stretched out, brushed a shivering trail down from his collarbone. House's tough meandered approvingly down his torso, mapped the hard lines of abs and pecs, dipped into his navel, quick and promissory, thrust, pressed, made Wilson suck in a breath, the surge of pressure shooting straight to his groin.

"Going to the gym," he gasped, nipping the inside of his lip hard to stem the tide of arousal at being able to _see_ House touch him, tantalise him with fingertip strokes that snaked up his breastbone, rollercoastered around his nipples, and swirled down, flickering over the soft line of hair that disappeared below his belt. "E-every morning at six for an hour and a half. On a good day, it gives me enough of an adrenaline boost to make it through 'til the evening. On a bad one, it gets me to about noon."

"Hence the lunch hour without lunch some days."

"It's hard to eat and have sex at the same time, without trashing the couch and my suit. That's why I'm wear the t-shirts." Wilson gestured vaguely toward the splotch of green cotton that had slithered off the bed and onto the carpet. "When you're not around, I can sometimes get back to the gym for half an hour in the afternoon, get me through until I've finished for the day. You were right, in the morgue, about my needing the endorphin rush."

The sense of being in the lime – make that cyan – light cut off as House's gaze sheered away.

"I didn't ask."

"House." Wilson snagged his wrist before he could withdraw his hand too and pulled the man's palm across to flatten it over his heart, covered House's fingers with his own, forcing him feel the hard steady beat of his heart. "It's you or a treadmill, okay? Not you or one of the nurses in the supply closet."

House snorted, but the tension that had crawled up his back and into his shoulders released in a slump and an exhale.

"The morgue just called. What kind of coffin d'you want for romance?"

But he couldn't meet Wilson's eye and, seeing how much it mattered – how much _he_ mattered – trapped in the shards of half-shuttered blue, Wilson slowly released House's hand to unpick the uppermost strip of surgical tape that bound the dressing to his right upper arm.

The dressing came away unnervingly easily.

Already propped up on one elbow, House shifted upright and gently took Wilson's wrist. He guided Wilson's arm away from his body, turned it just enough that he could study the ladder of lacerations in that half-moon of muscle. He said nothing and made no attempt to touch. He simply examined the raw red horizontal lines that tracked between and across other etiolated serpents of scar tissue, jagged craters and long pale rails marking journeys between the stations of self-hatred, guilt, disgrace, shame, fear, anger, and loneliness.

Knowing the damage he'd done to himself far too well to need to look at it, Wilson warily watched House's face, assessing the inevitable collateral of the revelation. But House was a flawless poker player. Both his voice and face were devoid of expression when he asked:

"Why this?"

It was only the second time he'd ever been asked. The first time, by his latest therapist, had come so hard on the heels of his expectation of being berated, shot-down, insulted, screamed at, or banished, that he hadn't been able to speak. Reassured by her unjudgemental understanding, knowing House too simply wanted to know, Wilson answered honestly:

"Because I've tried _everything_ else. I take regular exercise. I get a good night's sleep. I eat healthily. I have a job that I love and I work hard. I socialise with friends. I've stopped screwing around just to _feel something_. I have a...I'm in a relationship – unless you've decided to ditch me for being so screwed up"

House flapped that away with an impatient palm.

"Spare me the get out of jail free crap."

Wilson bit his cheek to keep from expending a sigh of relief.

"Hey," he protested, striving to lighten the atmosphere a little. "Give us both a break, here. This is the first time I've talked to anyone about this that I don't pay to listen. I've been in therapy for so long that, instead of years, I can count it in entire cheque books made out to different specialists!"

He found himself sobering again, chanced a glance into House's serious face.

"You've seen my medical files. You know I've been through most of the antidepressants on the market: SSRIs, TCAs, TeCAs, SNRIs, MAOIs and a bunch of those with Lithium as a booster. _Nothing_ works. The only options left were to develop a drinking habit, get hooked on drugs, or go back to my favourite high school fix. I can't hold my alcohol, you've patented the rights to the second, so I figured hey, do something a bit more _interesting._"

House hoisted a brow at him, sceptical. "There's something wrong with getting into bar fights?"

"Yeah, the part where I get arrested!"

"Well," House said consideringly, "It wouldn't be boring."

Wilson shot him a flat look. "Don't you think it's a bit of a been there, done that, got the t-shirt for both of us? I can't remember, whose turn is it to bail the other one out?"

One corner of House's lip flicked up in a crooked smirk.

"Mine," he acknowledged.

Memories montaged in the twilight between them. An antique mirror bursting into a sharp-edged storm of grief and fury; a stranger's shaggy, now achingly familiar, grinning conspiratorially through grey prison bars; clinic patients freshly diagnosed with proctoheliosis and a thermometer inserted anally to crowbar out the head; DUIs and apartment searches; spilt amber liquid and a matching bottle, empty, a body sprawled in puke on the carpet; white tablets in a paper slip passed through bars and thanks given in a wicked smirk of one-upmanship. Credit cards zinged through chip and pin machines, racking up debts and counter-debts. Archaic apologies and remembered rants replayed wordlessly in the ripple of traffic ever passing on the city streets. House's fingers, which had slipped down to rest on Wilson's thigh, where he was knelt on the coverlet, silently picked out the melody to Billy Joel's "Leave a Tender Moment Alone" on the inseam of his sweatpants.

"Is this all?" House asked, when the soundless song has played itself out.

His eyes flicked to the underside of Wilson's arm, still visible now his hand was laxly cradled on his own slanted lap. An inexplicable sense of calm suffused him, as though their mutual retrospective of the ruination they had both variously wreaked around their relationship had reminded him of its strength, its durability, its ability to honour the promises they'd never said but always made to one another: for better, for worse, in sickness and in health. His cheeks twitched, dimpling. For richer, for poorer too, for that matter.

"No," he owned and, dislodging House's hand for a moment, he rose on his knees and stepped back off the bed.

His bare feet thudded softly on the thick blue carpet. His sweatpants whispered against his skin as he shucked them off amidst the flanks of shadows where the streetlights didn't stretch beyond the bed.

He was bare but for his boxers when he climbed back into the shifting geometric patterns of pale light, knelt once more upon the striped red, black, white and blue throw that formed a rectangular block of colour across the foot of the white coverlet. House's gaze swept over him slowly, absorbing the strong lines of runner's muscles, the faint bronze of natural tan from dozens of mornings pelting through the head-clearing breeze or fierce heat of park nearest the hospital. But the search was nothing more than theatrics, a momentary pause in which they could both draw breath, test the weight of this new revelation.

The covers rasped as House shifted closer, his loose postural swatch, body upright, legs hooked to one side beneath him, uncoiled further until their knees touched. A faint line of warmth fused skin to skin, stirred hairs in a prickle of proximity. Goosebumps chased across Wilson's flesh. That part of his mind which coldly wielded his scalpel screamed at him, jabbed fear into his heart; but his gut gathered calmness from some inchoate source. His muscles bunched and quivered, but he didn't move as House stretched out his hand and lightly traced the heavy crusted H inside a square that Wilson long ago began to inscribe into his thigh.

Nausea pooled beneath his tongue as he watched House's fingertips chart his own initial. A terrified part of Wilson sought to close his eyes, dreading the clench of House's fist, the cruel slice of his tongue before he recoiled off the bed and out of the door, getting out before he got in any deeper. A muscle balled beneath the salt-and-pepper fuzz coating his jaw, but when he spoke his voice was strained with understanding, struggling not to crack beneath the recognition that not only was he in too deep to deny but that he was not in it _alone_.

"I didn't know you cared that much."

Wilson's fear fell away like discarded armour. He did the mother of all cartoon blinks and gaped at his oldest, dearest, closest friend and lover. Then his face crumpled with a kind of incredulous sadness.

"Oh House," he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "You idiot_._"

* * *

><p>They came together slowly, without any of the frantic clutching at fragile irretrievable moments or the breathless, half-angry, urgency that was borne from their long, recurring hiatuses. Languid and magnetic, they matched each other kiss for kiss, scar for scar. Sweat blurred between them as, for the first time, they entangled themselves skin to skin. Wilson's secret was packed up like a suitcase, slung away into shared closet space, not gone, not forgotten, but no longer his compass, directing every move and moment. As House buried himself deep under Wilson's skin, caught his cries in open-mouthed kisses, and let himself freefall under Wilson's hands, Wilson rode high on a surge of blood and hope that, one day, he might be able to discover what it would be like to be rebranded.<p>

* * *

><p>It was not exactly what he had had in mind, when he woke next morning to discover House's side of the bed cooling, the shower running in the bathroom, and his right arm adorned in tracks of scarlet. But the mischievous humming of Garbage's "Bleed Like Me" clued him in before his bleary eyes had blinkingly adjusted to the bright yellow rhombus of dawn smeared across the pale sheets. In bright red semi-permanent marker two dotted lines were etched onto his forearm. One looped horizontally around his wrist; the other ran vertically from wrist to elbow. House's sprawling capitals casually labeled each one for future reference. The first line read E.R; the second: morgue. Tumbling bonelessly against the pillows, Wilson threw back his head and laughed for the first time in months.<p>

[End].


	7. Chapter 7

**Rock Songs and Razorblades: Epilogue**

_One Year Later..._

"You're late!" Dr. Alex Wood called cheerfully, as Wilson stepped out of his Volvo onto the black and white gravel of her meandering driveway.

"Sorry," he answered automatically; but he knew she saw the smile in his eyes, shining behind the spectre of repentance.

The drive over from 221B Baker Street was nearly twice the distance than it had been from his post-divorce lodgings at the local Holiday Inn. He knew it. Mostly, he scheduled in the extra time it took, especially navigating the Saturday shoppers' traffic through Princeton's centre. But, once in a while, he left late on purpose and basked in the little thrill of having a few extra miles to go, of having a home to come from – and return to.

"What've I told you about lying to me?" Wood demanded, mock-sternly.

She rose from her knees where she'd been planting a cheerful red and yellow array of chrysanthemums in the bed that snugged up against the front of her house and dusted the earth off her palms onto her black jeans.

"Lie to you? Me?" Wilson deadpanned.

Tucking his car keys into the front pocket of the navy hoody he'd stolen from House, he followed her around through the little gate that led behind her house and onto the wooden porch. Habitually, he crossed to the rail that overlooked her rambling garden and perched on it, back propped against a pillar. From here, he could easily keep his attention on the swinging sofa where she took up her seat near the window of her lounge or let it flee across to the wooded landscape enclosing the lawn and the tall chestnut mare grazing peacefully in the field beyond the trees.

"Well?" Wood prompted lightly.

"Ten days."

Pride and incredulity jostled in his voice. His left hand strayed up to gently palm over his right bicep, explore again the strange absence of the rectangular bulk of a bandage beneath his sleeve. His fingers skittered down, sought the rubber touchstones of the three elastics he still wore looped around his wrist at all times; but he released them without twanging.

"Ten days and counting."

It would have been fifteen, had he not plucked up the courage to dash his parents' hopes of further grandchildren and secure an invitation for House to come to the annual Thanksgiving celebration in the autumn, not as his friend but as part of the family. Three days of touch conversations with every relative in the Hyphenated Tribal Clan of Wilsons, Rosenburgs and Wassersugs had triggered an irresistible need for catharsis and closure in cold steel, hot scarlet, antiseptic and gauze.

The bathtub full of leeches that had appeared on the third day hadn't had quite the same effect; but it had broken the cycle. Ten days later, there was dust settling on the self-medication kit he kept atop the cabinet over the bathroom sink.

"Congratulations," Wood said, voice quiet but her brown eyes bright with confidence and faith. "Ready to try another ten?"

Wilson's heart gave an anxious hiccup. He closed his eyes and focused on the summer sunlight stroking his cheek, the steady supportive presence of his therapist and the faint heady scent of bourbon, sweat and Doritos that clung to the navy hoody: House's indelible signature snug against his skin. He reminded himself that he had not a lonely hotel but a home to go to, not only Baker Street but his childhood one out in the Skylands. And still had his safety-net in its locked box. But it was no longer a painful, self-perpetuating secret that trapped him in a prison of self-enforced isolation and privacy. It was something that he could use – or choose to discard in favour of a phone call, a treadmill, or a fierce embrace.

"Yeah," he realised, surprise and certainty mingling in equal measure. "I am."

[The End].

* * *

><p><em>That's it. For real this time ;) Thanks to everyone who read, remarked, and enjoyed the ride!<em>


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